


Just a classic Cypderpunk

by Darke_Eco_Freak



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Agender Character, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 01:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18378455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darke_Eco_Freak/pseuds/Darke_Eco_Freak
Summary: No matter the world and no matter the time, New York will always have a Spider





	Just a classic Cypderpunk

Neo York is a big, bright, sprawling metropolis full of megacity blocks and cram-jam packed full of people. Neo York is a testament to humanity’s survivability. The first city re-established after the meta-wars and the first one to restart manufacturing on a wide scale. Neo York was everything the old world failed to be; strong, accepting, advanced and gorgeous.

Virus snorts as they swing past a sign blaring out the wonders of marvel brand miracle spray. Oh yeah, Neo York is just the greatest place around. The shiny and chrome Big Apple that the whole world's in awe of.

Anyone can make it big in Neo York, it's the city of glam and glitz and golden opportunities. You could be a star, by the lead in one of those big budget, low moral franchises people were losing their minds over.  You could start your own business, something fresh, something innovative, make some serious scratch and give your kids the life you never had. The possibilities are endless in Neo York, you just gotta have the balls to go for it.

Virus lets go at the peak of their swing and goes flying, wind slapping their face, neon signs catching on their skin. Virus fits right in, shiny like glass, a perfect mirror, twinkling and glittering as they sail through the sky. They fire another web to catch them before they fall too far and go slingshotting back up, higher and higher.

They're a Neo Yorker born and bred, never lived anywhere else, never even seen other places. They're exactly the kind of young schmuck the high ups in this city love reeling in, hook, line and stinker.

" _Come work for us_ ," they'll say, " _we'll pay you good, you'll live happy and healthy. You'll make a good life here_."

And the people buy into that shit. They eat it right up because they're starving, literally and metaphorically. They all want a dream to hang onto, something to make the bleak wastelands not quite so shitty, something to make their hard lives a little easier. People come to Neo York and they find that maybe it's harder than they thought, that maybe they got swindled but hey, it's Neo York.

Greatest city in the world. If they can't make it here then they'll never make it anywhere.

The real lucky ones get jobs up top, cleaners, menial workers. If they're pretty enough, they'll get a cushy office job where they don't gotta do nothing but sit pretty all day long. If they're not so pretty, they'll still get a job, grunt work but hey, it's work. The less lucky ones, well they get shoved down underneath all the glitz and glam. They get hidden away, they're too unsightly, they'd really bring down the market value if they got caught in the city proper.

Virus lands on the side of a building, clinging to a metal girder between floors, and sits there. Down below is the finance district, the probably the most beautiful place in the world, definitely the richest. There's more money down there than anyone under the city could ever imagine, more colours too.

A riot of colours and sounds and smells. There’s precious, precious old-world glass fit into every window in every skyrise, glinting off each other and throwing back the same image until it's a confusing mess. Blues and purples of holoscreens advertising everything from the latest com-links to the hottest clubs and newest fab food on the market.

There's the vivid greens of the actual clubs, the fanciest things around, full of sex and drugs and weapons and so much corruption it's a wonder the damn things don't collapse under all that. Clubs are probably the second most secure buildings out here, green security glass showing nothing, just a glare of green in between all the others. Red's for the brothels, the high-end brothels, because it's gotta stay classy.

Virus kicks away from the building, smirking when they feel the glass crack under their feet, and makes sure to aim an open-mouthed smile at their dwindling reflection. They had to look good for surveillance after all.

And if a little venom leaks past their teeth and dribbles down, down onto another skyrise, then what a shame. Nothing they could do to stop that.

Symb laughs in their head, curling tighter around their shoulders, and Virus shrieks as they fling themself into the sky. High, higher, they keep going, swinging between skyrises, climbing higher and higher until they fly past the tippy top of the highest rise. They're so high that they can even pick out a few stars in the not so dark night, little pinpricks of light, then they're hurtling back down again.

Symb’s the one that throws a web at the top of the Marquis, stopping their fall dead and leaving them to hang over all of Neo York. They're halfway between the stars and the city now, too low to make out any of those pretty little lights, but too high for the colours down below to be anywhere near distinct.

From up so high, the colours are a smeared rainbow, and it’s beautiful. Quinn doesn’t think they could’ve seen this many colours back before the bite, or hell, even after the bite they might not’ve seen the nuances between them But with Symb, as Virus? They can see it all.

They can see the reds bleeding into pink where streetlights cut across them, and the indigo mix when the flashing purple and blue hit each other. The green glints up through the smog, jaunty and taunting, just begging people to come stay a while, just a little while. Yellow search lights peak through every so often too, but that's the one that gets dirty the easiest, goes muddy amber or pale emerald.

And maybe it's cause they've never seen a real rainbow to compare but who needs real when they can come see an artificial one whenever they want?

Sure they have to squint and look through the smog laying heavy and thick at the hundredth story but what's a little smog? Yes it's like a heavy, dirty filter that makes everything murky but it's still visible, at least through Virus’ eyes. And way down below on ground level, through the smog, the people are teeny tiny, scuttling around like wingless flies.

Symb laughs, thin and wispy, and Quinn smirks, yeah _just_ like flies.

“Intruder alert, you have five seconds to vacate the premises or lethal force will be used,” a familiar AI voice warns them and Symb bristles. The glass they’re hanging onto clears up and in seconds there’s a guard with a gun glaring down at them.

Symb retracts, goes sleek and chic, and Virus blows a kiss as their spider sense goes wild. It’s a jolt of electricity racing up and down their spine, seeping into their bones and gnawing on their nerves.

The Marquis is the tallest building in the whole world, the tallest one ever built, so of course it’s owned by a man like Baron. Baron owns this fucking city; every glass plane, metal girder, bit of flesh and bone in it. He’s the big man in charge and he says who lives or dies.

And as always, Baron says Virus better get the fuck off his property. He’s already spending a small sum of a billion dollars on extra security to keep Virus out, he’d really hate to waste any more.

Virus snorts as the guard brings the gun up, sighting along the barrel, and lets their jaw drop wide, unsettlingly wide.

Baron’s a tech mogul, made his money in weapons, machinery and customizable AI, but he’s surprisingly old fashioned when it comes to killing. He prefers having people do it for him. His security system is entirely automated but his staff, his _kill squads_ , are people, just people, only people. Lucky, lucky Virus.

They can’t see the guard’s reaction as they lick every pointed tooth in their mouth, collecting their venom, but they know the person inside the riot gear is pretty damn freaked out. There’s nothing quite like Virus running around this city. Nothing quite so…alien.

The teeth in their mouth, they're not human, not animal either. They're long and curved sure but they've got barbs on them too, specifically to make bites as painful as possible. And then, where does their face end and the mask start? The uppercrust never knew the Spider, not personally, but they know what the Spider looked like. The black suit, the big purple lenses for eyes, reflecting back and segmented like an insect's would be.

A mask, of course it was a mask, but what's this? This seamless flow between big purple eyes down to a very open, very real mouth? There's no other features, just the eyes, just the mouth, so what is this?

The guard flinches back when Virus spits venom right at the glass, cackling when it starts dissolving through immediately. Oh no, that's another section of precious, old-world glass Baron's gonna have to replace. What a shame.

‘Down sweetheart,’ Symb purrs as their spider sense flash burns their nerves, as they let go of their web.

Down, down, down in a dizzying freefall. Symb twists them mid-air and Quinn feels a bullet go whizzing past their ear.

 “Gonna have to do better’n that baby!” Virus yells as they punch through the smog layer, down to mid-level. Another bullet goes wide-wide and Virus whoops loud and triumphant, flinging a web at another skyrise and grunting when it attaches. The force’s enough to jerk the bone out of the socket, enough to ripple through their body and squeeze their fragile organs hard.

Virus feels something burst, rupture, and Symb grumbles as she races to fix it up. Quinn just hangs there absently while Symb works; lovingly slotting their shoulder back in place and patting Quinn’s cheek when they grunt.

“Where’d I be without you, huh baby doll?” Quinn jokes, kicking out and away from the skyrise, back into the air.

‘Gutter? Dead?’ Symb suggests, hugging tight around her reckless human, and Quinn smiles softly. She’s right, they would be dead, long dead.

The Spider was a rookie before Symb came along, fighting low-level petty crime, and getting their ass handed to them more often than not. Their very own venom was slowly killing them, eating away at their teeth and poisoning their blood. They were _dying_.

‘So was I,’ Symb points out, turning them back towards home, and Quinn grimaces. What a pair they are. Symb was dying from the polluted air, from the poisoned earth, the city was killing her and Quinn’s own body was killing them. They **_needed_** each other, still need each other.

Symb keeps Quinn healthy, fixes what the venom destroys and enhances everything else. Having Symb is like getting bit all over again. And in return, all Quinn has to do provide a body that can survive this place and love her, and if that fails, there’s always assholes that need getting rid of.

They **_need_ **getting rid of. They deserve it. Quinn has to remind themself of that every time. Some people don’t deserve to live, not monsters like the ones they track down and tear apart. Not criminals like the ones they hunt through the lowest levels of the city, herding and taunting, dropping down onto and ripping into.

Symb caresses their cheek and Quinn shakes it off. The Spider was just another no-name fool hero, the Spider would’ve _died_ a no-name fool. If the venom didn’t get to them, the lost fights would’ve and then what would be the point of all their miraculous powers?

Virus isn’t the Spider. Virus is willing to do the tough shit, the shit that gets arrest warrants taken out on you and shoot to kill orders put on you. Virus is doing more for Neo York than anyone’s done before.

But, the thing about Neo York is, it’s a city. A huge, sprawling metropolis full of skyrises and over sixty million inhabitants. There’s so much money coming through it that the numbers lost meaning a long, long time ago. There’s money and there’s corruption and there’s crime and there’s terrible, horrible shit happening in all the dark little corners the fancy, schmancy police forces just don’t care about.

Neo York’s a city just like any other city, only it’s bigger, it’s better, and it’s badder than any other city that’s ever existed. There are crime lords and super-powered gangs ruling parts of it with iron fists, and there’s one big man at the very top watching it with a cool stare and a glass of scotch. And at the very bottom, there’s people that love this city, they love it with all their hearts, but the city’s as bad for them as it is for Symb.

They’re choking on the pollution the top throws down into the gutters and forgotten tunnels everything’s built on. They’re dying in their beds because they can’t make an honest living, because they can’t put food on the table or get clean water to drink. They’re dying because the people at the top consider them acceptable casualties, anything to keep their dazzling skyrises and multi-quintillion dollar enterprises.

Quinn is gutter trash, a tunnel lurker. They were born in the dark dampness of the city under the City. They never got to see the neon smeared sky until they were full grown, they didn’t get to taste food that wasn’t full of low level radiation until they were a teenager scraping out a living in the upper sections of the undercity. They’ve seen the absolute worst of this city, and they’re not even twenty.

But now? Now they’re Virus. A mad man’s experiment turned hero turned… _Virus_.

They’re an infection from the lower levels, the undercity this one is so happy to forget about. They fight the people the undercity never got the chance to, they take the things they always wanted as a child and they take it back down into the bowels of this metropolis and give to the people that need it.

Maybe some people get killed in the crossfire, but they’re the ones with the biggest kill count, so is it really wrong?

‘Quinn, sweetheart, Quinn,’ Symb whines, scraping at their consciousness, squeezing through the thoughts and pushing them back out. Out into the sky that’s whipping past them, the colours, the sounds, the buildings.

They’re in the agri section now, swinging above fruit trees, _real live trees!_ , and fields full of food crops. There’s more food in one single field here than there is in a whole undercity level. God they should’ve brought one of the mesh bags, they could’ve gathered something up but they didn’t think they’d be passing by here tonight.

…why are they passing here?

‘Drones, heard them,’ Symb answers, carrying them away from the agri sector faster than strictly necessary. Though, Symb would say something like anything that makes their sweetheart feel bad is very necessary to get away from.

Quinn sighs as they swing over into the poorer districts, the industrial section where all the manufacturing plants are. Baron owns all of them, through shell companies or brute force buy outs. He’s the only name in manufacturing here in Neo York, businesses either work for him or they waste their money importing their products from other manufacturing sites across the country.

Most businessmen are too invested in their profit margins to care what kind of man Baron is, they sign whatever he asks, they do whatever he says, and they make a tidy profit at other people’s expense. And at the expense of other people’s lives.

Nearly all the city’s smog comes from these factories right there, packed in together so tight it’s hard to see where one building ends and the other starts. Virus swings around an exhaust tower that’s belching black smoke into the air and wrinkles their nose. The factories never stop, they’ve never seen them stop, but the old folks say there used to be days, long before when the factories would shut down every once in a while.

There’s nothing Virus will ever want more than to see these factories get shut down for good.

‘Someday, we’ll do it sweetheart, we can do it,’ Symb promises as Virus climbs up to the top of the exhaust tower and removes the grate there. The tower’s only meant for run off gas, not for anything more, and it’s pretty narrow, but if Symb pulls in real close and makes herself a little slick, Virus can scoot down the shute.

The exhaust towers are the only way down into the factories anymore, after the riot of ‘476, all the windows got boarded up and the doors got walled off. According to the history books, by then, the undercity was already properly established and new tunnels got added that led straight to the factories. Ever since then, the undercity people have been working in the factories for shit pay, day in day out, never knowing what the outside world was doing.

Quinn hates going through them but the factories are the quickest way back down to the undercity from the financial district. And if Baron’s drones are out and about, they wanna head back home asap, those fucking things are a pain to deal with. Tonight was just a recon job anyway, checking up on a shipment of weapons coming in from Ash-Chi.

Tomorrow they’ll get some explosives and go sink the barge out in the bay. For now, Virus crawls along the ceiling, Symb changing colour until they’re just a patch of darker black moving through the shadows. Not a single worker notices them, every head stays hunched over their conveyor belt and hands keep moving as Virus makes their way over to the tunnels.

Though it’d be something if anyone did notice them up there. The factory ceilings are four stories high and not well lit, the florescents—because of fucking course they still used florescents in there—are spotty at best and missing at worst. Virus is just a spider crawling in the dark, looking for a nice snack while the good people work.

They’re lucky enough to catch the place on shift so there’s barely anyone to duck and dodge as they creep along the tunnel ceiling. The tunnels are lots more cramped, new edition tunnels always are. They’re made for two lines, one in, one out, and not much headroom to spare.

Creeping back down into the dank darkness is always…soothing after a swing around the big bad town, and Quinn can feel their muscles slowly relaxing. When they make it to a connector tunnel, they climb up into the air ducts and move much quicker. Here’s their very own playground, their territory.

Ever since the spider bite, Quinn’s been cleaning out the airducts all through the undercity, growing filtration plants at strategic airflows and leaving bugs at interesting vents. There’s not a single person in the whole city, top or under, that knows these vents better than Quinn, and by extension, there’s no one that knows the undercity as a whole better than Quinn. They’ve got it all mapped, they know who lives where and what passes through and how it passes.

They check a few traps as they crawl, the rats have been running low in the upper levels, someone’s been putting out poison and Quinn has to snort. Of course someone from the upper levels’ been putting out poison, those uppies loved to forget their roots down in the dark. They get a few more hundreds living up in the not so stale air and suddenly rat meat’s not good enough for them. They probably went after cats or something.

Another connector vent and they’re heading down, down into the deeper levels, there’s rats _here_ , and Virus snatches one up. Before Symb they would wait to get home and cut the thing, skin it, flay it, throw it in the pot of stew that was always cooking on the hotplate. Now Virus just unhinges their jaw and swallows the rat whole, chewing on the rubbery tail until their venom breaks it down.

Deeper, deeper they go, breathing in the scent of stale, closed in air with a happy sigh. Quinn will never figure out whether it’s a natural liking for small, enclosed spaces, the spider influence or Symb that makes them love the dark, quite spaces of the deepest levels. Crawling down into the earth, bedrock right there on the other side of the tunnels, feels right, feels good.

And it’s another minute before they’re in their personal vent, disabling their stolen security bot, and climbing down into their bedroom. They’re a hundred and sixty feet down below the surface in one of the lowest levels still capable of inhabitation. They’re the furthest away from Neo York’s topcrust as could be and it feels so good to be home.

Symb retracts, sliding back into Quinn’s bloodstream and settling just under their ribs in the space she carved out for herself. Sure Quinn’s missing a section of their intestines and part of a kidney but that’s no worse than the venom’d been doing, and Quinn can fix it. Quinn can always fix it.

Underneath is Quinn’s Spider suit, an extra precaution in case Baron ever finds out how to disable Symb and Virus is out of commission. The stolen and modified stealth suit looks drab compared to the sleekness of Virus, the reflecting black and electric purple. When they swing through the skyrises, they’re just another smear of neon in the air, and when they’re stalking through the tunnels, they’re a glint of something dangerous in the dark.

The Spider suit is just plain black, matte black, that blends into shadows well enough and can cloak to near invisibility. The big purple spider symbol on the chest is still bright though; glittering, gleaming stained glass.

Quinn peels it off and stows it under their bed, in the secret compartment they dug out of the stone. Then they collapse onto their mattress and breathe slow and deep.

Tomorrow night they’ll sink the shipment, and then they’ll go do some more surveillance if they have the chance. Tomorrow day they’ll go visit Feli up in the Rookery, see how he’s holding out up top, and maybe pick up some work in between. And if all goes well, it’ll be one step closer to taking down Baron and his whole empire, and if not, then at least it’s a difference.

‘We’re making a difference,’ Symb says, dragging the ratty cover over them and tucking them in tight.

Up above the city moves on, always moving, always doing, because it’s New York. A sprawling, crawling metropolis full of skyrises and factories and corruption and crime lords and so much potential.

There’s so much bad in this city, but Quinn knows, they know, that there’s so much good too. There has to be.

**Author's Note:**

> I like Spiderverse and I made a spidersona, sue me.


End file.
